Inukshuk (10 page)

“Poor sod.”

“I say, a murian on all things Irish.”

“Why's that?”

Something peripheral had Thomas's attention now. He glanced up from the page at his bedroom wall and the hanging corkboard stuck full of pictures of Franklin, Crozier, McClintock, Jane, Rae, and maps of the northern, polar fringe of the territories, with Franklin's likely path emblazoned through it in purple Sharpie ink—the entry from Greenland through Baffin Bay and around Cornwallis and then south down Peel Strait; two
x
's showing the presumed spot where the ships froze in just off Victory Point; then overland down King William Island, more
x
's for known burial sites and boneyards, and across the last inlet (and the key to the passage), ending at the head of Back's River in Starvation Cove. Would Crozier really have wandered off with the Chippewa if he'd made it that far? Wouldn't he have? Why not? Why go back to England, having already been passed over for commander, turned down by Sophia Cracoft, and then having ordered his own crew to eat one another? There was probably a whole line of mixed-blood Crozier Chippewa somewhere still. Might look something like the stoner bus driver, Cody/Dakota.

And then it hit him—the thing that had been working its slow way through his brain circuitry ever since Devon's call came in and he'd been waiting for his father to get off the line so he could have a few words before Devon's minutes ran out: the Facebook message he'd left open and unsent on his father's computer. Thinking back to the precise moments in which he'd stood away from his father's desk chair, flung the chair around, that word
failure
eating at him, clotting the edges of his vision like something that would erase him altogether if he didn't act, and quickly, get a pencil and paper and just DRAW already, he was pretty sure he'd never closed his screen or hit send. No, he was positive. He even remembered the
stair-stepped last few lines he had not been able to knit satisfactorily to any logical, grammatical finish, and the promise he'd made himself exiting the room:
Finish that later
. Later. Right. He furled upward from his bed and went stealthily to the head of the stairs and down, along the hall to his father's study. Stood a second in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust, then went in, careful to sidestep the boxes of his mother's old photos and letters, puzzles, books, and other childhood junk, unsure at first if the hunched shadow aggregate at his father's desk was father and chair or just chair. Then the shadow was moving, turning toward him and leaning to one side, light from the hallway illuminating his face.

“Yeah, he's right here, in fact. Just a sec. Good talking to you, kiddo. Right. Love you, too.” He held out the phone.

Quick test: If Devon spoke first, all was well. Probably. If he waited, if he let Thomas wade into it before saying anything, there was trouble. That would be Devon's style: wait and lynch. Hang back, let Thomas chatter away, and then snare him. The phone was still warm from his father's hand and smelled faintly of his shampoo and aftershave. His breath. Thomas held it to his ear and breathed once into the mouthpiece and again, quickly retracing his steps back out of the office and up the stairs.

“Ahoy, matie. T! You there?”

“Present.”

“Scurvy dog. What's up?”

Safe. His father, true to form, had probably never read a word, never noticed Thomas's open screen or thought to pry. It would not even have occurred to him to do so.

“Same old.”

“True not. Dad says you were treated to a little of Houndstitch's finest today. Dude. Tell!”

Thomas threw his door shut behind him and sprang onto his bed, plucking up pencils, erasers, and notebook and clearing aside his knapsack of unopened school textbooks before dropping down, back to the wall and pillow across his lap. “What are you talking about?”

“The school-yard fun and fisticuffs?”

“Oh—that. Yeah.”

“
That. Yeah
. Dude, what planet are you on anyway?”

Together they gave the reply—a joke of long-standing family tradition:
Planet T, where the boys have big brains and the girls won't talk to you
.

“It was no big thing. Just some really immature homosadistic jock ritual. Who gives a rip.”

“And what about the girl—what was her name?”

“Jill. From next door.”

“We're still hanging out?”

“Sure. Whenever I'm in the mood or whatever. Yeah.”

“This is the one with the harelip?”

“Not a harelip! Jeez. I told you! It's a birthmark, and it's not that big a deal.”

“OK, OK. Sorry. Lighten up. No big score yet?”

“Fuck off. You'll be first to know if it happens. Promise. When it happens. I'll tell you.”

“That's good. Because I might have some technical advice for you. Pointers, you know, from a procedural standpoint, like how to make sure she gets off, and be sure to put your dick in the right hole to pop her cherry.”

“You're such a jerk.”

Laughter. “Come on. It's my role in your life, giving you shit, just like it's your role in my life, to keep the malicious juvenile side of my brain active.”

“Glad I can be of service. So when's the visit?”

“Actually, I was talking to Dad about that. I've got labs and exams right through the last day of the quarter, so I was thinking, on my spring break, I might actually just go up and visit Mom for a few days.”

Ice in his belly and sudden numbness, the clotted dark spreading up at the edges of his vision again. He kicked his legs out straight and clenched his thigh muscles, then knotted a fist around his pant leg and pulled hard, making the material constrict cuttingly around his leg. What? Visit Mom? “You what?”

“Yeah. I don't know. I figure why the hell not? Right? Catch a ride with one of the mining planes and get someone with a snow machine to haul my ass the rest of the way. Haven't seen her in an age.”

“Sure. But did you . . . have you, like, talked to her about it?”

“Oh yeah, sure. Of course.”

“When?”

“Couple times. I don't know. Last week, I guess it was. Week before that.”

“You're talking to her now?”

“Not all the time. Every week or so since the start of the quarter, something like that.”

He unballed his hand and turned it over on his leg, palm up, stretching open the fingers until they bent backward and the white of bones and tendons stood in speckled relief against the surrounding tissue and blood. Squeezed the hand shut and open and shut again and drove it into his leg as hard as he could.

“Sorry, man. I guess I just assumed. I figured, you know, if she was calling me . . .”

“No.”

“That wasn't too swift of me, was it?”

“Letters.”

“Pardon?”

“She sends letters.”

“I see.”

Again he drove his fist into his leg. Not hard enough. You could never hit yourself hard enough to do damage or make it hurt anything like enough to drive out the other pain. His fingers stung now and his joints felt etched with nerve endings; in his leg, a dumb nothing of an ache.

“She probably just doesn't know when to call you. You know, like when to be sure Dad isn't around or whatever . . .”

“They could talk. Wouldn't be the end of the world.”

“Sure. But I don't think that's exactly what she has in mind right now. It isn't really in the cards, as they say.”

“Too bad!”

Devon sighed audibly. “Anyway . . .” He'd said it like their East Coast grandfather,
ann-a-way
—another family joke of long standing.

“Gotta go already?”

“Yeah, actually, I should. Tons of studying here. And I've already been on like an hour with Pop.”

“Twenty minutes!”

“How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Studying?”

“Please. These classes here are so undergeared, you would not believe, dude. If I have to open a book before the end of the term, I'll be really surprised.
Honors
math we're still talking about parallelograms and polyhedrons. Last week in history class, some dufus actually asked how Julius Caesar got his name from a salad. I kid you not.”

“Smoking a little too much of the salad himself.”

“No doubt.”

“So get Dad to pass you up to grade eleven.”

“Uh . . . think I'll just stick with the stupids, thanks.”

“Well, I gotta study here. You go on back to your movie or your Facebook or whatever it is you waste your time on these days.”

“I'm not wasting time, Devon.”

“Well, that's good. Better than I could say at your age. Do me a favor, though?”

“What's that.”

“Eat some LEMONS. Eat some good juicy lemons and ORANGES. And then suck on some of those ester C lozenge things. Ain't worth killing yourself over a little art project. Believe me . . .”

“It's not a little art project.”

“Have it your way.”

“But wait. You didn't—did Dad say anything to you about, you know?”

“What?”

“You know, did you talk to Dad at all about the whole . . .”

“Relax, bro. Your little
secret's
safe with me. I didn't say a word.”

“OK. Same goes for here, then. I guess.”

“I don't follow. Same what?”

“
Your
secret.”

“You mean the new tats and—wait. Are you
blackmailing
me, Thomas?”

“I'm just saying . . .”

“Because for a second I thought that's what I was hearing.”

Silence.

“OK, Devon. Bye.”

 

 

Sunlight hot on every stone
. . . sometimes he could see his way right into it and remember all his original inspiration: man-faced seals, two of them, riding the inner trough of a wave, the older one chin-to-chest, back-swimming, younger one following, tail weaving in and out of water. Father and son. Flash of light in the lifting water between them, brilliant, hot as the sun-hot stones ashore—and at the crest of the next wave, the white longboat, gunner at the prow, gun raised. The older seal knows what's next even before the puff of gun smoke and delayed report of the gun. He doesn't dive to safety through the wave or look away from the gunner's eyes.
Oh but you will be sorry,
he wants to tell the gunner.
You would kill your own wife's only son
. But he has no language for it, no man speech anymore. Only knowledge.

Franklin had been aiming for this moment, the final death scene, final wave, for as long as he'd been compiling the poems leading up to it: birth of the selkie changeling in blood and seawater; man eyes peering from a seal-whiskered face; and later, the poems of his shape-shifting to come ashore—rounded black seal eyes in a man-whiskered face, drunk as only a human can be and air-swimming, bar to bar, touch of sweet nighttime on him everywhere; seduction of the land mother in a firelit laundry room; firelight on the stone hearth and sheets; more blood; departure, and then the return to land seven years later, again man-formed, fur hidden in a heap
under a rock, to purchase his son with a bag of gold and foretell for her their deaths (his own and his son's) at the hand of her future husband. When he could, when he believed, he flew straight in: his own transmutations of icy Albertan prairie, white prairie light, oil fields, distant Rocky Mountains and cottonwoods, into poetry—into seals and men and seal-men in the waters off the northernmost coast of England, and the imagined underwater selkie kingdom of Sule Skerry—all of it cohering in lines and words he understood about as well as he did his own blood circulation. Other times, it was drudgery. Swimming against a tide of ill-matched words and worlds. Lines that didn't breathe or scan right, iambs and spondees sticking through line breaks isolated and treacherous as shoals. Almost like he didn't know the first thing about putting two words side by side—almost like he didn't speak the language. Always it was a game, seeing his way back into it. Always, he was losing. And then getting it right again. He trusted neither instinct, not the one that said
Quit now
, nor the one that said
Go on
.

The call from Devon had thrown him out, of course. Happily. He was always glad for a call from his son, never considering it a bona fide “interruption.” If Thomas had inherited all of Jane's mysterious gloom, coupled with his own tendency to prefer, above anything else, hours alone lost in worlds of his own imagining, Devon had gotten both the more socially functional, calculating, outgoing, and observant self Franklin brought to his own teaching job
and
most of Jane's analytical, technical smarts. All Devon didn't have of their sunnier attributes was her music. She was gloom illuminated by and interpenetrated with string sound. Thomas was gloom, period. Fascinating gloom. Devon was . . . something else. He was almost like a kid from a TV show; sometimes, he was that perfectly, surprisingly apt in every social setting. A stranger. An (at times) overly energized, athletic stranger.

Parts of what Devon had said to him now remained stuck in his head, forming a subcurrent of argumentation just beneath the poetry as he sat trying to hear his way back in. One thing in particular, which had to do with Jane and a catchphrase of hers he'd been
almost surprised to hear coming from Devon:
Time to face facts, Dad. Shit or get off the pot, don't you think?
What it meant was, he and Jane had been talking about him. Of course. But what it also meant was that he had to examine, again, in response, his own rationales for not serving her with divorce papers until Thomas was out of the house. She, of course, was free at any time to file. He wasn't sure how he'd respond if she did, but he was pretty sure she wouldn't. It just didn't make enough difference to her, one way or the other, no loss or gain, no contested custody, and she wasn't one to waste time and money on inessential legal paperwork. Aside from needing to protect Thomas, stay in Canada, and keep the door open for her return, and aside from the fact that making their separation final and legal might involve more officially sharing with her his cash-out on their house in Calgary, he also knew that as long as he was still attached to the idea of a reconciliation (and he was), if he served her with divorce papers, it would be (a) only because he felt forced into doing so by her, or, worse, (b) because he was playing for a reaction from her (i.e., reconciliation). Once Thomas was grown and out of the house, if nothing had changed in the interim, then would be the time to serve. But Devon saw things otherwise.
You're stuck
,
Dad. File first; get over it later. Thomas can deal
. He hadn't said it in those words exactly, but Franklin knew him well enough to know it was how he saw things, what he meant.
You need to move on already. As long as you hang on to a dead marriage, how can you go forward in your life?
But I am going forward. I'm in a new house, new job. I'm working, writing. I've got prospects. Having hope is not the same thing as hanging on.
But, Dad, in this case it kind of is. Time to face facts. Time to shit or get off the pot, I say
. . . .